In hospitals, drug doses are sorted in individual departments by the health care personnel for patients of that department in trays with recesses according to the time of day at which they are to be taken; morning, noon, evening or night. The health care personnel has to spend about 2 hours per day and department doing this, and it also requires a drug storage facility in each department, at least for a limited amount and variety of drugs, which leads to expensive stocking and the risk of expiration of the expiration date. Since stocking must be taken into account in each department, a correspondingly large inventory of drugs must also be kept in the hospital pharmacy or the supply pharmacy of the hospital. Packages for the department stockrooms are commissioned for the individual departments once or even twice a day.
An automatic commissioning device for drugs (U.S. company of BAXTER), which has individual plastic containers for drugs, has been known. The containers contain one type of drug as an open, i.e., unpackaged bulk product, which must be confirmed in writing by at least two pharmacists. Each container has a wheel-shaped dispensing device with an electric motor-driven ejector, which is set by the manufacturer to the product to be commissioned and is put into operation when the individually packaged products are commissioned and delivers a single pill into the feed hopper, through which the pill will then slide into a plastic bag assigned to the patient.
The drawback is the expensive checking, the complicated setting of the device, as well as the complicated design, so that only relatively few types of drugs and only frequently requested drugs can be stored and commissioned automatically. The use of such an automatic unit is limited to 900 to 1,500 specialties in an assortment used in hospitals.
It should also be taken into account and is disadvantageous that only open, unpackaged individually packaged products can be commissioned, i.e., open pills, capsules, tablets, which are filled or strewn into the corresponding compartments of the automatic unit. Thus, only about 200 unpackaged drug types are available in a hospital. The prepackaged drug types are unsuitable for the automatic hygienic commissioning process from the very beginning and must be "commissioned" by the health care personnel by hand.
Open unpackaged pills, etc., are also subject to a certain wear or mutual abrasion during commissioning. As a result, the single dose to be administered cannot be exactly ascertained for a patient. Moreover, since only one feed hopper is provided for all plastic bags, cross contamination may sometimes happen, namely, when rests of one drug come into contact with another drug commissioned later in the feed hopper. Finally, the commissioned plastic bags must be further handled, labeled and distributed manually. The risk of mixup of the commissioned pills up to the patient is not ruled out.